Image by Ching Lau via FlickrAlex is a self taught developer who has built an inspiring travel information site - iGuide.travel - that makes him low six figures in annual income. The money has tripled every year since launch. More than half of his money comes from travel booking, about half from Google AdSense.
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
We talked at length yesterday over dinner at Mitali, and then through a long walk over to Union Square and on over to the Hudson. We have been friends since December 2009 when we met at a NY Tech MeetUp after party. He was buying drinks for everyone around him. I don't even know you, he said, and bought me a drink anyway.
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
iGuide.travel is an interactive map and travel guide. He started out by wanting to inspire people to go explore the world. That mission has stayed, but he also added on a new mission along the way: innovation. Innovation as a techie, as an entrepreneur. How can he better understand the needs of those who visit his site? 30% of his traffic is from North America, 30% Europe, 30% Asia.
iGuide.travel is "the world's premier travel mashup." It relies on user generated content from a few different sources. It has "lots of photos, lots of maps."
"Who are your competitors?"
"No competitors. It is the best and the only one."
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
"People just need to get out of their country, that's all," says Alex whose father is a geography professor in Philadelphia, his elder brother - "my genius brother" - a software entrepreneur focused on aviation training with four Masters from Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. Alex was in Japan for four years as a kid where his parents were teaching.
"Tokyo is New York City out 20 years. If the aliens were to land, they would land in Tokyo."
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese
He launched the site in April 2007. A year later he felt the first spurt of traffic. He started getting 1,000 page visits a day. Then it died down. A few months later in November 2008 he was doing 3,000 visits a day, or 100,000 visits a month. Today the site does 425,000 visits a month. He makes more than some CTOs of some top tech companies in town.
Putting the site together has been "a long learning process."
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
iGuide.travel has 20,000 destinations, 7,000,000 places on the map, and 100,000 travel guide pages. The site has 6.5 million inbound links according to Google Webmaster Central.
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
Some of the pushes the site hopes to make down the line are to do with the Google Maps Street View, improving loading time, and creating a mobile version of the site. He also has Mapcarta.com in the works. It is an interactive atlas. He also has a You.travel in the works which is like iGuide.travel Lite. That is also more experimental. He hopes to have 6-10 languages on You.travel. He would like to move from making low six figures now to making low seven figures down the line. How exactly? He does not know yet.
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
He is headed to the University College London ("where Gandhi went") for a Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship that should be a September 2010 to September 2011 stint.
"All I wanted was to be able to pay my bills doing this," he says. That was his starting point. 30K would be nice, he thought. But then you cross one hill, and you see another.
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
Life-work balance is something he thinks about a lot, and he feels like a lot more tech entrepreneurs should. You need to socialize enough to make up for all that screen time, he says.
While he was still working on his site, he took off to be in Rome from Fall 2007 to Spring 2008 for a few months of learning Italian. He was still working on the site while he was learning the language.
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
A few weeks back he realized it had become painful for him to handle the mouse with his right hand, so he trained his left hand to do it. At first it was hard, like showing up to learn a new language. And then he did it. And now it feels so natural to do it.
"I think this has activated the right side of my brain."
“The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
He is a first generation American. He was whiling away in San Diego for a while before his New York City move. In San Diego he met a college friend of mine from Kentucky, a Bengali guy now based out of Cincinnati where the NY Tech MeetUp emcee Nate Westheimer is from; Mitali means light in Bengali, but we did not figure that mutual friend part out for a few months of knowing each other.
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
His father was born in Austria, mother in France, both Ukrainian. His brother is based in England.
“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
Alex feels like he has mellowed out since he hit his six figures income. I like not having to think about money all the time, he says. I am more relaxed. The money will keep coming while he will be at school in London.
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
He says he is a huge fan of the "big screen web." And he is excited about 4G. Pages take too long to load now.
“Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew
“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” – Lillian Smith
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton
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